Lots of people ask me, “How do you manage urges to overeat?”
Those moments when you want ice cream, or chips, or cookies or M & Ms? You know not only will they taste good, they will ease whatever emotion is going on, whether it is anxiety, fear, anger, boredom, you fill in the blank.
I have a method that really works. You are going to manage your brain with a hack that will de-condition the urge/reward reflex.
First, a little background on why we overeat. Most of us have learned during our life, that when we have unpleasant emotions or experiences, food makes us feel better. Certain things like processed foods and sweets work really great at making us feel better. Food is the reward. This whole process is going on in our brain.
Your primitive brain is like a toddler who loves to be rewarded and has a fit when that doesn’t happen.
Your prefrontal cortex, your adult brain, is the reasoning brain that knows that not all food is beneficial for the body.
This is how a lot of us gain weight – we are eating food to fix our emotions or make them go away. Mine started when I was just a girl and making or eating cookies to make the uncertainty and negative happenings at home go away. It works great. Unfortunately, this does not benefit our health or our weight.
What we want to do is use our adult brains to be in charge of our health and our eating. We know what we want to do, but that darn toddler brain screams when he or she is not rewarded anymore. Your primitive brain (toddler) seeks pleasure and wants to avoid pain. Your adult brain can understand delayed gratification for long term benefits.
Here is the solution, the brain hack I talked about. It is a 6-step process I learned from my coach mentor, Brook Castillo of the Life Coach School. You will need a glass jar and some glass beads or marbles.
Step 1. Write down everything you will eat tomorrow. Do this 24 hours ahead of time. You are using your adult brain, not your reactive brain.
Step 2. Eat exactly what you had planned. This builds integrity with yourself. You are learning to honor yourself. Your primitive brain will want to deviate – you will ignore the toddler. You choose and you decide. That said, if you are planning to go to a party or special event, plan an exception. This develops trust. If you deviate from what you planned, write it down. Don’t kick yourself, just write it down.
Step 3. Anytime you have an urge, allow 10 minutes to pass. Notice the urge, but don’t act. Allow it.
Step. 4 If you wait the 10 minutes and do not act on the urge. put a glass bead in the jar. You are creating a visual reward system for your brain. Just like getting a star in kindergarten, you are rewarding the toddler, too. You goal is to get 100 beads in the jar. If you are not at home, find a place to keep the beads and move them from area to another, like in your purse, when you don’t act on the urge.
If you mess up and do act on the urge, just don’t add a bead. Its OK. But every time you see that jar fill up, you are going to be visually rewarding yourself.
Do this from a place of loving yourself – not deprivation or willpower. Eventually your desire to reward yourself with food and overeat will diminish. Like I wrote about last week, what would feel like love?
Step 5. Track your weight each morning. If your weight doesn’t change over 2-3 weeks, adjust what and how much you are eating.
Step. 6. Repeat 100 times, until your weight is where you want it. Express gratitude to yourself for your accomplishment!
Try it and please let me know how it works for you. This method really helped me to let go of my desire for chocolate chip cookies.
Would you like a free weight loss guide I developed to inspire you to move forward with losing the weight and managing your brain around food? Click on the green button here.
Want to chat about your challenges with your weight and where you would like to be? Ready to love the way you feel in your body? Shoot me an email at jane@janespringer.com and we’ll set up a call to talk about it. I’d love to hear from you.
Much love,
Jane
Get your free divinely inspired weight loss guide here.
Jane Springer is a certified Life, Wellness and Style Coach who assists women in taking care of themselves, in body, mind and spirit. She coaches women who want to lose weight, avoid diabetes, and feel great. She also helps them thrive after divorce. She also helps them to clear their closets of old clothes and outdated attitudes, so they can shine and feel confident.